Asylum seeker suffering worlds away for Gillard

Gillard’s press conference, a wan and fumbled affair, most lacked what we film writers call an emotional line.

She called the shipwreck ‘a tragic event’. She refused to blame anyone (except, of course, the ‘evil’ people smugglers) until all ‘the facts’ were known. She said ‘facts’ a lot, repeating the word as she did ‘moving forward’ in the first hours of her prime ministership. She praised the Christmas Islanders for helplessly watching people die so close to shore. She said how dreadful it must have been for them. She called her border protection officers’ efforts ‘successful’. She said she wanted to find out ‘the truth’. She offered continuous briefings to the Opposition. She offered what amounted to a Committee of Unending Investigation till ‘all the facts are known’.

At no point did she offer her sympathy to the bereaved. At no point did she offer help with their funeral arrangements, or psychological counselling, or assistance to young children who had watched their baby sisters die, or gifts of toys to them, or playmates, or anything like that. At no point did she assure them they had suffered enough, and they would not, now, be sent back to the Middle East. She didn’t say she’d attend the funerals, or a commemorative service like those that followed the Bali Bombing.

Her lack of any emotion but public nervousness seems puzzling. It seems as if there were five panes of glass between her and the bludgeoned, bleeding, drowned bodies she must have been seeing. It was as if she was not connecting to the death and suffering at all but merely, as was once remarked of Lyndon Johnson, dealing not with the problem, only with the politics of the problem.

The politics of this problem will mean she does not meet the disaster victims, a world-first in modern politics, or assure them of anything. It will mean she will try to keep news cameras away from them. It will mean little grieving children will be ‘detained’ and ‘assessed’ and suspected of not being ‘genuine refugees’ since escaping the shipwreck that killed your mother in high seas does not count in this assessment. She will have to face down Julian Burnside, Adam Bandt, Rob Oakeshott and Andrew Wilkie. She will have to give Wilkie reasons why interviews with the children should not take place. She will have to give him reasons why he cannot visit them.

Or that I think is her plan. The humane alternative, that she declare them foundlings of the sea and let them all in, and apologise for her border protectors’ failure to save them, attend the funerals of their relatives and offer them compensation (like the families of the victims of 9/11) will not have occurred to her. And why is this?

It’s perhaps because she doesn’t get it. She smiled now and then while answering questions, a foolish thing to do. She mentioned none of the survivors by name, though she mentioned a lot of Australians by name. It’s as if the boat people didn’t altogether exist. They were a problem, no more. They were factors that a lot of process would deal with.

She evaded the central question, which is not what happened but what happens now, and so failed her first big test as a nation’s leader. In a Churchillian situation she promised not blood, sweat and tears or broad sunlit uplands but a consultative process not involving Muslims that after many, many months will ‘establish the facts’.

It’s hard to see how the Greens and Independents will like her much anymore, or what will become of her.

Bob Ellis’slast two books on Australian politics, One Hundred Days of Summer and Suddenly, Last Winter, are in bookshops now.